Black Rock

by John McFetridge

  “They should stay behind the desks,” Carpentier said. “They can do less damage there.”

  “So,” Ste. Marie said, “that’s where we are now.”

  They all drank and it was quiet for a moment, and then Dougherty wanted to contribute something so he said, “One of the guys I know in the Point, a guy named Danny Buckley, I saw him getting into a brand new Cadillac with one of the Higgins brothers. The youngest, I think, Danny.”

  Ste. Marie and Carpentier were both nodding then and Carpentier said, “The one you ran into at the dépanneur,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah. Maybe we could talk to him.”

  Carpentier said, “Maybe,” and looked at Ste. Marie, who said, “He’s a young guy, your age?” Dougherty nodded and Ste. Marie said, “Okay, so he might be a good contact for you.”

  “For me?”

  Ste. Marie said, “Sure, until they bring all the constables onto the CATS, too, everybody is chasing terrorists and we just hand the city over to the mobs.”

  Someone in the crowd yelled, “Eille Gilles, c’est le public qui fait ta job asteure?” and a bunch of guys laughed, and Dougherty turned to see the bomb squad guys coming into the bar, Gilles Vachon saying, “Il a travaillé avec des explosifs dans l’armée,” the other guys all nodding and shrugging as if that explained nothing.

  Dougherty looked at Carpentier, who said, “There was a bomb at the post office on Queen Mary Road last night. The janitor dismantled it before he called it in.”

  “It’s true,” Ste. Marie said. “He did work with explosives in the war. There were four sticks of dynamite.”

  “It wasn’t called in?” Dougherty asked.

  “Looks like they aren’t calling them all in anymore,” Carpentier said, and then Ste. Marie looked at Dougherty and said, “So you be careful.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, they sent us a memo,” and the two detectives looked very serious, both nodding in understanding.

  Carpentier said, “Oh, well, a memo.” Then he looked at Dougherty, “Have you done your time with the night patrol?”

  Dougherty said, “Not yet,” and noticed Ste. Marie smirking a little.

  Carpentier noticed, too, and shrugged and Ste. Marie said, “He must know how to punch people, look at him.”

  “A few months,” Carpentier said, “it’s good for the constables.”

  Dougherty didn’t say anything but this was the first he’d ever heard of a cop in Montreal not being positive about the night patrol. Being honest with himself, Dougherty would’ve had to admit he’d been suspicious, all those stories about these legendary cops, a dozen detectives not connected to any particular station, working the whole city from midnight until they decided the night was over, taking on the bad guys all by themselves. But Dougherty’d worked enough night shifts to know that it was mostly fighting with drunks and grabbing kids breaking into dépanneurs for cigarettes or chasing low-level drug dealers. Most constables rotated through the night patrol, working three months with the detectives. Dougherty hadn’t been asked, but he figured it was just another case of his last name pushing him to the bottom of the list.

  Now Ste. Marie was saying, sure, “For a few months it’s okay, but we have other things to do right now,” and Carpentier said, “Yeah, sure, of course.” Ste. Marie looked at Dougherty and said, “Look, you’re only as good a cop as your information. You need good informants.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Dougherty said, seeing right away this could be good, this could really help him get noticed in the department.

  “Just be quiet about it,” Ste. Marie said. “Maybe you can just run into some old friends, not on duty, not in uniform. Maybe you could buy some hash yourself.”

  “But this isn’t an official assignment?”

  Neither Ste. Marie nor Carpentier said anything, and Dougherty nodded. “Okay, I get it.”

  And he was thinking too bad there wasn’t a memo for buying hash in the Point.

  But he was looking forward to talking to Buck-Buck again.

  chapter

  nine

  The call came in, as they usually did, to a French radio station, CKAC. It was just after one in the morning, and CKAC did what they always did and called the police.

  The call said the bomb was in the north side of the IBM building at 150 Montée de Liesse Boulevard, out by the airport, so the St. Laurent cops were also called and a member of the Montreal bomb squad who lived nearby was woken up and sent over. When he got there and found the bomb was much bigger than he expected, at least fifty pounds of dynamite, he immediately called for the evacuation of the motel next door.

  Dougherty was working days all week but he’d pulled a double shift and was sitting in Station Ten half-listening to the radio and filling out an arrest report — some big spenders at the Playboy Club got into a fight during one of the acts, a guy billing himself as a “super pickpocket,” and one of the belligerent drunks wouldn’t calm down and finally had to be brought back to the station.

  The night sergeant said, “Motel by the airport? Might be full of stewardesses, you want in on that evac?”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, maybe I do.”

  Before the sergeant realized he wasn’t joking, there was a loud explosion. The ground beneath their feet shook, and Dougherty was up walking towards the desk, saying, “That can’t be the airport.”

  “It’s got to be closer,” the sergeant said, and then the call came in from dispatch saying a bomb had gone off on the McGill University campus. Dougherty was out the door before the sergeant had a chance to say a word.

  Up Guy and east on Sherbrooke, it was about ten blocks to the Roddick Gates entrance to the campus and Dougherty was there in about three minutes with the light flashing and the siren blaring. He could see the smoke pouring out of one of the newer buildings on the east side of the campus. He drove another block to University Street, turned up and saw the lights of two other cop cars flashing red on the sides of the buildings.

  Less than a week since Dougherty and the other cops had been all over the campus looking for a bomb that turned out to be a false alarm, and now no call for one that did explode — with the bomb squad way out by the airport.

  One of the other cops already on the scene was an older guy Dougherty didn’t recognize, but when he yelled, “Fermez la rue,” Dougherty jumped back into his car and drove the half block back towards Sherbrooke and parked across University Street, blocking it. As he got out he saw another cop car doing the same on the corner of Milton, a little further ahead of the building with the smoke pouring out of it, which Dougherty could now see was the McConnell Engineering Building, about ten storeys of concrete and glass.

  There was an apartment building across the street and people were starting to look out the windows, but Dougherty didn’t think they’d have to evacuate.

  The fire engines started showing up then, so Dougherty had to move his car to let them through and then move it back to keep the street blocked. After that there wasn’t much for him to do, but he was used to this kind of uniformed police work now, closing a street, leaning against his car and having a smoke, and that’s exactly what he was doing a few hours later when the sun came up and the city started to come to life. He had to keep some reporters and photographers back and CFCF even sent a camera team, but there wasn’t much for them to see.

  One man tried to push his way through, and when Dougherty held him back the guy said, “I am the vice-principal. I have to get through.” And Dougherty was thinking he looked more like a businessman than his high school vice-principal, but then he figured at McGill the vice-principal probably wasn’t giving boys the strap and expelling girls for smoking on school property.

  Once he’d said who he was, some reporters started asking him questions, and the vice-principal said, “I forecasted this.” That was when Dougherty knew he could go back and lean against his car. Now that this guy ha
d an audience he wasn’t going to stop talking, and that’s what happened. “I said it only stands to reason after Westmount,” he said and looked meaningfully at Dougherty.

  “And what’s going to be next? These terrorists get bolder every day — the next time a bomb goes off it will be in the middle of the day, the building full of people.” Dougherty was thinking, Yeah, like the stock exchange that this guy forgot all about because it didn’t affect him personally and they were just lucky no one was killed, but he didn’t say anything. “Or they’ll start assassinations like Robert Kennedy and Dr. King or hijackings or anything they want because no one’s stopping them. Look at this,” he continued, waving the Gazette in his hand, “West German envoy kidnapped in Brazil and now 40 criminals are being let out of jail. This giving in to terrorists just can’t continue.”

  The reporters all agreed with the vice-principal and Dougherty heard a few things about nothing being done and what are all the cops doing and that kind of thing, and he lit up another cigarette and waited. He didn’t know anything about the West German guy kidnapped in Brazil but now he was figuring he’d pick up a paper and have a look.

  Around seven Sergeant Delisle came by and Dougherty asked him when he was going to be relieved. Delisle said, “You want to go for a coffee, go, but come back — we have no more men.”

  “I’ve been on since yesterday afternoon.”

  “I know but there’s nothing I can do. Did you hear about the other bombs?”

  “One out by the airport?”

  “Two at the IBM building,” Delisle said, “and one more at Domtar.”

  “In the Point?”

  “No, in Senneville. Did you know there was a Domtar plant in Senneville?”

  Dougherty said, “I’m not even sure where Senneville is,” and Delisle said, “No one is. The DJ from the radio said it was on Kenneville Street, so we spent twenty minutes looking for that until Vachon said maybe he meant Senneville.”

  “Did it go off?”

  “No, all three of those bombs were defused and brought in.” The sergeant looked up at the McConnell building and said, “This is the only one that went off.”

  “And it wasn’t called in.”

  “These cocksuckers are getting too bold.”

  “There’s a man over there,” Dougherty said, “who agrees with you.”

  Delisle said, “Go get your coffee,” and then as Dougherty walked into the crowd yelled after him, “And come back!”

  Dougherty decided if he was going to be on the scene for a few more hours he was going to have a proper breakfast, so he walked the few blocks to Park Avenue and sat in a padded booth in the Hollywood Restaurant and ate bacon and eggs and toast and drank two cups of coffee while reading the Gazette. He’d never been much of a newspaper reader — he thought it was kind of funny his little brother was reading it cover to cover now and not just the sports — but when he did pick one up it was usually the evening paper, the Star, or one of the French papers, usually the Journal de Montréal.

  The article about the West German guy kidnapped in Brazil didn’t have much more information than what the vice-principal complained about. The envoy, a guy named Ehrenfried von Holleben was, as the article said, “snatched from his car by urban guerrillas after a street gun battle,” and had been held for a few days by a group calling themselves the “Popular Revolutionary Vanguard,” which sounded to Dougherty like something out of a movie. But then every country in the world seemed to have these “popular front” groups setting off bombs and robbing banks and hijacking planes and kidnapping people. And then asking for asylum in Cuba or, since that movie came out, Algeria.

  Dougherty was thinking how the McGill vice-­principal had no idea how right he was. Back in the winter, February or March, a tip had come in from an informant and a couple of cops pulled over a rented truck. The cops said the truck was driving erratically, but the two guys they arrested knew better. In the truck with them were a couple of sawed-off shotguns, a basket big enough to put a man inside and, in one of the guy’s pockets, a press release saying that the Israeli trade consul in Montreal, Moshe Golan, had been kidnapped. Both the guys arrested were out on bail. The story had been in the papers, but Dougherty couldn’t remember many people talking about it.

  Another article was more interesting for Dougherty, a city column called “On and Off the Record,” that said things were very quiet in the Montreal underworld, a nice break from the past two years, and although there were still a lot of armed hold-ups and thefts, these were ­criminals on a ­completely different level. The column said the “smoother, more professional criminals prefer to operate in a less obvious manner,” and Dougherty realized this was what Detective Carpentier and Ste. Marie were talking about when they said the Night Patrol wasn’t going to be much help. The criminal world was becoming a lot more organized and the police had to keep up if they ever wanted to get beyond street dealers and low-level thugs.

  Then Dougherty was thinking, Low-level thugs like Danny Buckley, working for the Higgins brothers, who were getting smoother and more professional every day. Now he wanted to get to the Point and talk to Buck-Buck about hash dealers and what kind of cars they drive, but first there was a bomb scene to clear.

  When he got back to his car, still parked in the middle of University Street, he saw someone he knew walking by.

  “Ruth. Hey Miss Garber.”

  It took her a second to recognize him. “Constable Dougherty, right?”

  “That’s right, we talked about the Bill murders.”

  She said she remembered and kept looking at him. He wasn’t sure if she was waiting for him to elaborate or not. “You said you were at McGill.”

  “Yes, but my office is on the other side of the campus. It’s open, isn’t it?”

  Dougherty lit a cigarette and nodded. “Yeah, there wasn’t that much damage — it’s mostly broken glass and some kind of heating pipes, steam pipes, nothing structural. This is the only building that’s closed.”

  She walked right up to the cop car and stood beside Dougherty and said, “I heard there were some more bombs last night?” and he said, “Yeah, but not around here. A couple at the airport and one in Senneville.”

  “They’re trying to blow up planes now?”

  “It was in an office building near the airport, IBM. The one in Senneville was at a Domtar office, some kind of research facility.”

  Ruth was pulling a cigarette out of a pack of Peter Jacksons. “So, engineering, IBM and Domtar research; not exactly the oppressive government.” She was digging around in her purse so Dougherty flipped open his Zippo, and she looked up at him as she bent forward a little and got her smoke lit.

  “No,” he said, “just English.”

  “At least it’s just English business. I guess we’re safe in sociology.” She tilted her head back and blew out smoke, and Dougherty said, “For now.”

  Then she said, “There hasn’t been anything more on the Bill murders?”

  “Not that I know, just …”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m supposed to say it’s ongoing.”

  Ruth frowned a little. “I’m not a reporter. I’m working on it, too.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, of course,” and then she said, “I’ve been working on it for months,” and Dougherty realized she probably knew more about it than he did. “Maybe we could talk about this some more.”

  “I guess, if you want.”

  “Do you want to go to dinner?”

  She was just getting the cigarette to her mouth and took it away without taking a drag. “I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

  “I was thinking maybe tonight.”

  “That’s a little short notice,” she said.

  “You eat dinner every day, though, right?”

  “Straight to dinner. No meeting for coffee, not lunch, not
even just drinks after work?”

  “With all these bombs going off,” Dougherty said, “anything can happen — we’ve got to act fast.”

  He’d fallen into flirting without even thinking about it, and she seemed to be going with it. But there was a fire engine and the bomb squad truck just up the street.

  “Can we wait until Wednesday?”

  “We’ll be taking a big chance.”

  “We take a chance just going to work.”

  Dougherty said yeah, but he was thinking the flirting was starting to lose its charm.

  Then it looked like Ruth was thinking the same thing because she looked a little more serious when she said, “So, dinner on Wednesday.”

  “Yeah.”

  “At the greasy spoon by the police station?”

  “Pete would like that, but no. What would be your second choice?”

  A cop was yelling at Dougherty now to move his car out of the way so the fire engine could get past, and Dougherty looked at Ruth.

  “Do you know the Mazurka?” she said.

  He had the door to the squad car opened and said, “On Prince Arthur, sure,” and as he was getting in Ruth was moving away but she was nodding. “It’ll be seven before I can get there,” and Dougherty said, “Okay, see you then.”

  He moved the car out of the way and watched Ruth cut between the buildings on campus. Then he tried to remember in all this running around if he was working days or nights.

  chapter

  ten

  Dougherty finished his eight-to-four at seven thirty, the earliest he’d finished in a long time, and went straight home and changed out of his uniform into a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a collar. He thought he looked like one of the Beach Boys. Well, one of the Beach Boys five years ago, even they’ve got long hair now. But it was the best he could do.

  It’s not like he was ready for undercover work.

  The radio came on when he started his car, Chantal Renaud singing “Plattsburgh Drive-In Blues,” and he realized he’d left it on a French station and went to change it, but he liked the song, the way she sang the line about taking Canadian money in English but the rest in French and then all the doobie-doobie-dos at the end. But the next song was too go-go, so he pushed the clunky button and the needle jumped to 1050 CKGM, where “American Woman” was playing. That took him all the way down the hill on Atwater, through the tunnel under the Lachine Canal and into the Point on St. Patrick.